A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in...
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Posted on August 20, 2008 1:00 PM • 25 Comments •
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Posted on August 17, 2008 12:00 PM • 1 Comments •
Published by Yale University Press A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman is a new book describing how the brain works (and does not work) in something of an Oliver Sack's experiential manner, but with a twist. Zeman is a Professor of Cognitive...
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Posted on August 15, 2008 6:51 PM • 1 Comments •
The phrase "genomic imprinting" has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of...
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Posted on July 23, 2008 3:30 PM • 1 Comments •
A study just out in PLoS Medicine suggests that an increasing trend of delaying childbirth is associated wiht a rising rate of the use of cesarean delivery. The explanation appears to be impared uterine function. From the editor's summary: Though it was not studied here,...
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Posted on June 30, 2008 8:01 PM • 2 Comments •
There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses....
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Posted on June 28, 2008 12:25 PM • 24 Comments •
Sometimes boys are worth more, sometimes girls are worth more. In an evolutionary sense. Or, more correctly, the value of a certain sex ... as an offspring ... can be measured in fitness terms. Fisher noted this and hypothesized this was the explanation for the...
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Posted on June 24, 2008 9:50 PM • 11 Comments •
MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its "reversed" sex-role mating...
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Posted on May 17, 2008 8:34 AM • 0 Comments •
That was the lyre bird. This is the liar bird:...
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Posted on April 19, 2008 10:29 PM • 1 Comments •
Recently published research shows that individual humans will be nicer (more altruistic) when there is the possibility that the recipient of an act can respond verbally. The paper, "Anticipated verbal feedback induces altruistic behavior" is published in Evolution and Human Behavior for March....
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Posted on April 9, 2008 7:09 PM • 1 Comments •
